Power Supply Efficiency and Heat:

Heat and heat tolerance is a key concern in device selection for SSD Enterprise solutions, especially considering that the drives may be used in RAIDs/Notebook PCs which have a significant power dissipation on their own. A typical Enterprise SSD may draw 2-4 amps for normal operation. However, unlike the incremental increases in power demand for a hard-disk drive when capacity increases, a SSD’s power consumption increases more linearly as memory increases.

Not only will a lower noise, higher efficiency power supply increase the lifespan of the Enterprise SSD by reducing the heat of the environment, it can also decrease the number of erroneous rewrites by providing more stable voltage rails for the Flash and NAND memory cells. It is important to select solutions that have good efficiency at both full loads and light loads since the drive may spend most of its time in standby. TI’s recommended power solutions ramp up and become stable quickly without over-shooting the regulation voltage. This allows the SSD Enterprise drive to wake up, accept data, and go back into standby in less time.

Interfaces:

Three different interfaces are typically seen within Enterprise SSD solutions. SAS (Serial Attatched SCSI) and SATA are common interfaces with similar features. SATA has three generations as mentioned previously with maxiumum transfer rates of 1.5, 3 and 6 Gbits/s. SAS connectors have three generations of slightly higher maximum transfer rates including 3, 6 and 12 Gbits/s. PCIe is in its own category with transfer rates of up to 2, 4, 8, and 16 Gbits/s.